Tomorrow I am sending the Conductor back to the shop, since the loan is over.

All in all, I think highly of the amp section of it, but unfortunately the DAC has some issues and the sound from the DAC is not to my liking even though it has a quite high level of clarity/purity. The emphasis on the treble is not dominant, but enough for me to look elsewhere. I already have the Soloist, and I am now going for a separate DAC to pair it with. At the moment Metrum Octave is on the radar, but it is about two years old, so I expect there will be a successor this year - so I am going to be patient.

To further elaborate on the heavy noise issue that sometimes would happen when listening to songs; for me this only happens in 24/192 bit rate. Anything less and I get no issues at all. It would sometimes happen when I would be watching a video on Youtube and then play music from my music player(Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 or Foobar2000). I'd have to restart the song or the player sometimes. But maybe this will go away seeing as I just got my unit last night. I don't have any music over 16/44.1 so I can't speak on music issues when playing high end files.

150+ hours in, I'm beginning to really like the Conductor. The treble is finally smoothing out. I would be wary of judging it prematurely.

I am not totally satisfied by the sound I'm getting, but agree that it is significantly better than the HA-160D here (including bass. It took about 100 hours before I liked the bass and mids, but more than 150hrs before I liked the treble).

I currently use the HiFi tuning fuses in my Marantz SACD player from more then a year and I am more than happy with the result I got, it was easy to describe the difference straightaway with the first sounds. To be honest I wanted to see if this is not the case of the placebo effect so I put the stock fuse back (I do this twice) and the difference was always clear for me. These fuses really do this job.

I will use it in my conductor too together (until i finish my DIY power cable with built-in mains filter)

Thanks guys!
Good to hear what's worked with the Conductor.
There is a mindfield of opinions out there. Never having heard the benefits myself, the return policy of Synergistic Research is appealing... Please chime in if you have compared a few fuses :-)

Question about the driver: I was just looking at the Burson Conductor page and noticed that there seem to be two links for the Windows 7/XP driver. Where it says "MS Windows 7 and XP driver" the "MS Windows 7 and XP" part links to a driver named "Burson_USB_Win7_Xp.zip." But the last part of the link text ("driver") links to "Burson_USB_Win_(1.130).zip."

Are these two different drivers? If so, what's the difference? Is one an updated version? I don't see anything about it on Burson's site.

EDIT: Nevermind, the second link doesn't work. But now I'm wondering if the driver was at some point updated and whether I'm using the current version. I'll investigate further, I guess.